About a year ago, Gary Tinterow, the curator in charge of the
museum's newly formed department of 19th-century, modern and
contemporary art, issued a carte-blanche invitation to Ms. Walker, who
is known for parlaying the genteel 18th-century art of cut-paper
silhouettes into scathing, racially charged installations. She could do
whatever she wanted in one of the underutilized mezzanine galleries in
the Met's 20th-century wing: a show of her own work, of work from the
collections, or a combination of the two. She opted for the combination
and began to sort through the museum's holdings in American, European
and African art.

But the project turned unexpectedly urgent for
Ms. Walker when Katrina struck New Orleans, exposing racial inequities
with a starkness perhaps unequalled since the time of the civil rights
movement. The post-Katrina spectacle of deprivation, malfeasance and
ineptitude inspired Ms. Walker to focus her exhibition on the murky
confluence of race, poverty and water in art from various periods. She
named it "After the Deluge."

The show's fascinating flow of
images, ideas, styles and mediums has as many crosscurrents and
undertows as the average river. Race or water figure, blatantly or
subtly, in every item in the dense salon-style hanging: a selection of
mostly American 19th-century paintings and cut-paper silhouettes,
punctuated by Ms. Walker's own works, including a wall-size silhouette
piece, three large framed works and 20 works from a series of small
framed cut-paper pieces called "American Primitives" from 2001. [...]

If, like Goya, Ms. Walker is a pitiless satirist who skewers the human
condition with a grace and precision tantamount to tenderness, you
could almost say that Katrina is Ms. Walker's equivalent of Goya's
Napoleonic Wars. But not quite: "After the Deluge" includes no
post-Katrina work by Ms. Walker. Instead, it reminds us that poverty
and even water have also been longtime themes for Ms. Walker; if
anything, her work warned of the pathologies that Katrina unleashed. [read on...]